The invention concerns a brush, in particular a tooth brush, comprising a brush body and a bristle carrier supporting a plurality of bristles and being preferably removably retained on the brush body.
The invention is described below, by way of example, as a tooth brush, however, it can be used in the same fashion with other cleaning and application devices having bristles, in particular, washing brushes, scrubbing brushes, cleaning brushes, toilet brushes, brooms, paint brushes, application brushes for creams, powder, cosmetics, medication, spices or paint or even floor treatment brushes, wherein these applications are explicitly included in the invention.
A manual tooth brush of conventional construction comprises a longitudinal brush body made in general of plastic material, whose rear section serves as a handle, and the front head end of which comprises a bristle field having a plurality of bristles fixed to the brush body. An electrically driven tooth brush has essentially similar construction, wherein the brush body is subdivided into a base part accommodating the driving motor and serving as handle, and an attachment part supporting, at its front head, the bristle field and comprising a transmission for converting the motion of an output shaft of the driving motor into an oscillating or back and forth rotating motion of the bristle field.
The bristle field of a tooth brush experiences the largest amount of wear through use. Since worn or bent bristles insufficiently clean the teeth and damage the gums, it is recommended to replace tooth brushes every three months. With conventional tooth brushes of this type, with the bristle field being rigidly connected to the brush body, the bristle body of manual tooth brushes must be entirely replaced when the bristles are worn and the attachment part of electric tooth brushes, including transmission, must be replaced. It has been realized for some time that this procedure is both uneconomical and ecologically questionable.
To prevent these problems, so-called removable head tooth brushes have been developed, wherein the bristle field seats on a removable bristle carrier, in particular in the form of a stable plastic plate which engages in a depression in the head of the brush body, limited by a projecting edge. Since the dimensions of the tooth brush head are limited for handling and application reasons, the edge of the depression reduces the bristle field size. This limitation is acceptable with manual tooth brushes. However, with electric tooth brushes whose bristle field is in any event smaller than that of manual tooth brushes for structural reasons, the bristle field becomes very small which consequently reduces the cleaning effect of the tooth brush.
Moreover, it has been shown that dirt and bacteria can accumulate in the depression and in the gaps between the brush body and the bristle carrier which are difficult to remove such that use of some tooth brushes with removable head is questionable with respect to hygiene.
To securely retain the removable bristle head on the brush body, same has to be sufficiently stable and thus hard which creates the problem that the sensitive mucous membranes come in contact with relatively hard structural parts when using the tooth brush. This could cause injuries.
In conventional tooth brushes, the bristles are usually rigidly held in the bristle carrier. This has the disadvantage that the bristles cannot deflect in the axial direction during cleaning and can deflect in a transverse direction only due to their intrinsic flexibility. When applying large cleaning forces, these forces transferred to the teeth and gums essentially without resilient absorption thereby possibly causing injuries. It has been attempted to dispose the bristle bundles in a resilient fashion on the brush support. However, the construction required therefor is very demanding and requires very expensive production methods.
It is the underlying purpose of the invention to produce a brush of the mentioned type which avoids the above-mentioned problems and which is of simple construction.